Street cleaning starts as of midnight

Toronto should look a little cleaner and smell better starting tomorrow.

That’s because litter and garbage will start to be cleaned up off the streets as early as midnight tonight Geoff Rathbone, general manager of Solid Waste Management told a press conference this afternoon.

“As you can imagine cleaning up the city will be a large and complex operation,” he said around 3 p.m. “We will commence work early tomorrow morning by beginning the process of emptying and returning to service the city’s 5,000 litter bins.”

If city council approves the contracts for CUPE local 416 tomorrow, the 26 temporary dumps will be emptied of about 25,000 tonnes of garbage starting on Aug. 2. 

“Our goals are the removal of the waste from all sites by Sunday evening to allow for the sites to return to normal operations,” Rathbone said.

All 26 dumps will continue to be open until 7 p.m. tomorrow.

On Saturday five dumps will remain open until 7 p.m. at Herbert H. Carnegie Centennial Arena, Scarborough Arena, Centennial Arena Community Centre, Wilket Creek/Sunnybrook Park and Villers St.

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Starting Sunday, all 26 neighbourhood dumps will be cleaned by city employees, and if necessary private contractors will also be hired to do the job within the required 24-hour period.

City manager Joseph Pennachetti has authorized overtime pay to get the job done.

Regular waste collection will resume for homes and small businesses and on Aug. 4.

“Follow your collection calendar for both their day and type of waste (to be picked up),” Rathbone said.

If you don’t know when garbage, recycling and organics are normally picked up on your street, go to www.toronto.ca/garbage and click on collection calendars.

For the next month, there will be no limits on how much garbage, recycling and green bin waste residents can put at the curb for collection. However, the city will only be picking up on the regularly scheduled collection days.

Garbage should be put out on only days when they would normally be collected and not on recycling day.